Alpha Testing @ waylay

It’s been a while since i posted a blog. That’s not because of the ‘Gentse Feesten #GF14’ or because we are enjoying a summer holiday break at waylay. On the contrary, we have been extremely busy!

Last week, we reached another milestone: alpha testing.

Based on our many customer interactions during the last months, we refactored our UI and made it easier for people to create new software-defined sensors. The goal of the alpha testing was to expose the new framework to people that had not seen it before by presenting them with hands-on exercises.

We gathered in a spacious meeting room at our iMinds offices in Ghent. After pizzas got ordered, Veselin gave a quick overview of the platform, its features and capabilities. Next, we jumped straight into hands-on exercises. We tried to be a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ while observing what people did, where they were hesitating or got stuck, without intervening ourselves.

The results were very encouraging, if not spectacular. Alpha users got it, and were programming end-to-end use cases after less than an hour, including:

The creation of new software-defined sensors

Data preprocessing and wiring logic in the waylay graphical editor

Attaching actuators

And finally deploying/debugging tasks from the cloud

Users appreciated the compactness of logic representation compared to other workflow engines they had used in the past. And even better, they had some good ideas for use cases they are gonna try to implement in the next weeks, and asked us to open a feedback channel.

Along the way, our smart audience also started negative testing and hacking. They discovered a few bugs along the way and had some great suggestions for usability improvements.

We ended the evening with a series of open-ended questions, that resulted in an interesting and interactive discussion and brainstorm. Thank you guys!!

In the next couple of weeks, we will integrate the feedback into the product and we are planning to do another round of testing with new users in September. So stay tuned, subscribe on our website or contact us if you would like to participate!